Monthly Archives: May 2010

User Experience Design begins with the definition of a user experience strategy, or a shared holistic vision for what a product or service will be from the end user’s perspective. Before a design team can start creating a product or service’s interface and defining specific capabilities, the team needs to evaluate ideas to determine what will meet both user and business goals most effectively. Defining a user experience strategy up front is critical to making sure that all design decisions map back to a vision that is supported by research and that has defined success criteria.

Read more to understand the elements of a UX strategy, why it’s important to make the strategy tangible, and some techniques to create a tangible UX strategy.

“What has been and always will be true about Design Research is its consideration of people. The future lies not in ignoring needs, but in broadening our horizons. We need to think about more than just insights. We need to be collaborators and co-creators not only with the companies we are designing for, but also the communities and individuals we are researching.” – Tara Mullaney

In Part 1 of this series, I introduced a design project I contributed to for Fortune.com. Fortune asked several User Experience Designers how they would redesign Facebook’s privacy settings to address recent outcries over privacy concerns on the social networking site. You can view the final article here. Part 1 focused on the first few phases of the process I went through to define a strategic direction for the redesign.

I identified the two primary privacy problems facing Facebook today as the unwanted public disclosure of information and the difficult management of social networks. The strategy proposed to address these issues focused around three key themes:

Increase visibility of privacy information by placing it in context of user interactions

Assure users that information they disclose is being disclosed to the intended audience

Improve clarity around privacy settings

This post focuses on the process I went through to progress from many rough ideas to a single refined solution.

There has been a lot of discussion recently about Facebook and privacy. Users are angry, upset, and concerned that Facebook is exposing their private information without their consent.

JP Mangalindan from Fortune.com recently contacted me and asked me and several other User Experience professionals and designers how we would redesign Facebook’s privacy settings (if you want to jump ahead and see the end result, view his article here). I then started working on what turned out to be an incredibly challenging design problem. I quickly learned that creating a safe and secure environment on the popular social network while still accomplishing Facebook’s desire to increase information sharing is easier said than done.

The challenges include needing to thoroughly understand the current privacy concerns, what needs user have to address these concerns, and how to design an interface that not only puts a new face on the current system, but addresses deeper issues with how privacy is integrated into the user experience.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the survey I posted this past week! Your feedback clearly indicated to me two things: most of you like the focused, concise, simple nature of the quotes, but most of you are also open to a wider range of content.

I am going to start experimenting with posting new types of content. I’m hoping that this will provide you with additional sources of inspiration extending beyond the quotes. For now, I am going to reduce quote postings to twice a week and reserve at least once a week for other types of articles. This schedule may change based on your feedback and overall reception to the new types of posts.

The default RSS feed will include all posts. For those of you who are only interested in the quotes, I created a separate feed that you can subscribe to. As I add different types of content to this site, I’ll provide separate RSS feeds for those as well so you can subscribe to the content that you’re most interested in.

Please send me your feedback as this site evolves! This site exists for the User Experience community, and I want to make it as useful as possible.